“... from the settlement they imposed on it. Wilson, heading the strongest of the winning powers, may have had his flaws, like Tsar Alexander before him, but in Ghervas’s view is entitled to imaginative sympathy. He was no less moved than the tsar by high religious and moral ideals, which in his case found expression in the covenant of a League of Nations ...”

“... led the way in the shift of TV viewing to wireless internet from cable (although the internet may still enter your house through the same cable that delivers the TV). It has been adding nearly twenty million subscribers per year, from all over the world; it has almost a quarter of a billion now. It makes films. It churns out its own shows and buys ...”

“... collective life. And always, however stertorous and philistine the previous century’s slumber may have been, it was dreaming most deeply of that future life, and throwing up premonitions and travesties of it. Once upon a time, what we call ‘education’ consisted essentially in interpreting dreams like these – telling the children about tradition, or ...”

“... politician who had lost to the liberal candidate in the Romanian presidential election in May. The rally, an all-you-can-eat buffet of anger, conspiracies and victimhood, drew more than a hundred thousand people who broadly share the idea that innocent white Britons are oppressed, silenced, cheated and disrespected by a malign, power-wielding ...”

“... and Levi’s uniqueness is that he is even more the artist-chemist than the chemist-writer – he may well be the most thoroughly adapted to the totality of the life around him. Perhaps in the case of Primo Levi, a life of communal interconnectedness, along with his masterpiece on Auschwitz, constitutes his profoundly civilised and spirited response to those ...”

“... so involved in watching the monoliths of the Catholic Church and the Fianna Fáil decline that we may have missed what was really happening. Maybe if we start viewing Ireland through the eyes of marketing people, rather than literary critics, we will see things more clearly. A man called Peter Prendergast is unique among marketing people in Ireland in recent ...”

“... they had reason to think a project like that might turn out to be for the good of everybody. It may be obvious now how wrong they were, but Gibson’s urge to remake, to deliver his own people out of the slums and into a pure, new, shock world, has plenty of wrong-headed nobility in it, and no shortage of high-mindedness. Gibson was a workaholic. He was the ...”

“... the mid to late Seventies, to Derridean anxieties about the metaphysical haunting of texts. Which may simply be to say that several of these poets have been around for a while, and that they’ve been interested in radical or oppositional modes. Often notions of purity and incantation (the poet-shaman, again) get the edge over the numbing mix of ...”

“... you cannot spend day after day with the same person: it becomes psychologically destructive. You may not hate each other, but you do get very irritated. There was a good library in the prison but it had no works by Marx. Marx’s writings were reserved for the prison officers! So I wrote to the Governor asking for books by Marx. I did this after I found out ...”

“... historic promise. In Western Europe, by and large, the Old Left meant social-democrats. People may still vote for these parties as a pis aller, but since 1968, let alone 1989, no one dances in the streets when they win an election. No one expects them to bring about a revolution, not even a peaceful one. And most disillusioned of all are their own ...”

“... paradox of the ‘Stalinist Leader’. Lenin’s first major stroke, which he suffered in May 1922, left his right side virtually paralysed and for a while deprived him of speech. He realised that his active political life was over and asked Stalin for some poison so that he could kill himself; Stalin took the matter to the Politburo, which voted ...”

“... of millennia of art and culture, evidence of the rise and decline of regimes. However Stalinist he may be by temperament, his culture turns Italian Stalinism into something other than its Russian original. The man who made that change most explicit was Antonio Gramsci, the intellectual founder of Italian Communism. Gramsci saw from the beginning that Lenin had ...”

“... III. Though this was not printed either in English or in Latin until after his death, the work may once have been intended as an aid to the consolidation of the dynasty into whose service he had entered. Here was one kind of political activity, besides the day-to-day work of a City legal official and member of the King’s Council. Within a couple of years ...”

“... a pound: as one reads of the grossness of his later years one wonders whether sheer self-disgust may not also have played some part. But surely, too, it was a simple matter of self-fulfilment, of gratification of ego? We are told that inside every fat man there is a thin man trying to get out. Doriot may have been a case ...”

“... strong links to the power structure, but they live largely in a separate world; and while they may contaminate the workings of the state, they don’t threaten the state itself. The Russian state has broken down – it hasn’t disappeared – and at present, as a militia lieutenant put it on TV recently, everyone is grabbing what they can. (A man educated ...”